The Day the Crayons Quit by Drew Daywalt
Published 2013 · 30 pages · 8,250 words · Children's Literature, Satire & Humor
How hard is The Day the Crayons Quit to read?
The Day the Crayons Quit scores 13 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it relatively accessible. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 12 out of 100
- Daywalt writes in plain words for young children, with short complaints in each crayon's voice. Its vocabulary sits close to Judy Blume's young adult prose, though simpler.
- Sentence structure: 100 out of 100
- Each letter uses short declarative sentences and direct requests. The structure is simpler than the Diary of a Young Girl's.
- Abstraction: 14 out of 100
- Concrete objects and everyday grievances carry the story, like the comic adventure of Asterix. The only abstract idea is fairness.
- Information density: 80 out of 100
- At 8,250 words with large illustrations, each page holds one crayon's complaint and little else. The pace is lighter than Beach Read's.
- Narrative indirection: 12 out of 100
- Each crayon states what is wrong outright, and the pictures reinforce it. Readers infer only Duncan's reaction and the final fix.
- Symbolic density: 15 out of 100
- The crayons stand in for people with complaints, and the story carries no further symbolism. It is lighter than the Diary of a Young Girl's direct experience only in having a simple conceit.
- Ironic distance: 22 out of 100
- The jokes are gentle, such as Yellow and Orange fighting over the sun, and nothing undercuts the surface. It sits near Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret in sincerity, with a comic edge.
- Resolution withholding: 80 out of 100
- Duncan answers the complaints and the book ends with a tidy fix. Closure is as complete as in Beach Read's genre-expected ending.
- Structural complexity: 15 out of 100
- A series of letters follows a simple pattern, one crayon per page, and ends with Duncan's response. It is more fragmented than the Diary of a Young Girl, but easy to follow.
How The Day the Crayons Quit is regarded
The Day the Crayons Quit holds a literary regard score of 30 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.